Word.ws English Dictionary

meatball surgery

meatball surgery noun: surgery performed rapidly in a military field hospital to stabilize the patient as quickly as possible.

Noun

meatball surgery (usually uncountable, plural meatball surgeries)

  1. (colloquial, usually) Surgery performed rapidly in a military field hospital to stabilize the patient as quickly as possible.
  2. (usually) Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see meatball, surgery.

Forms of meatball surgery

pluralmeatball surgeries

Origin of meatball surgery

Coined or popularised by Richard Hooker in the novel MASH (1968).

Questions about meatball surgery

What does meatball surgery mean?
Meatball surgery means surgery performed rapidly in a military field hospital to stabilize the patient as quickly as possible.
What part of speech is meatball surgery?
Meatball surgery is a noun.
What is the plural of meatball surgery?
The plural of meatball surgery is meatball surgeries.

Words near meatball surgery in the dictionary

  1. meatbags
  2. meatball
  3. meatball flag
  4. meatball flags
  5. meatball surgeries
  6. meatball surgery
  7. meatballs
  8. meatbally
  9. meatborne
  10. meatbot
  11. meatbots

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: meatball surgery (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-meatball surgery.wav.

Cite this entry: “meatball surgery.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/meatball_surgery. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.